Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities. David Lawton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii+243.

Abstract

The movement of the book is recursive rather than linear; the chapters, Lawton acknowledges, are “a series of overlapping investigations” and “concentric essays,” not a “developing monograph” (11). Some of the claims that come up for repeated, and increasingly nuanced, reflection over the course of Voice in Later Medieval English Literature are as follows. Scholars need better literary-historical and literary-critical tools to account for the vivid achievements of medieval poetry, especially fifteenth-century poetry. The resources for such interpretive revitalization are scattered widely in the cultural tradition and may be unlocked by cross-period juxtaposition as well as by historical contextualization. Medieval revoicing was a creative and subtle undertaking, in which aesthetic skill, subjective self-definition, and social relation were all at work. As interpreters, modern scholars need to be better at recognizing real literary indeterminacy—and this is particularly vivid in the case of narratorial voice, which is too often collapsed prematurely into character or autobiography. Finally, our scholarly paradigms need richer midlevel concepts to account for the collective and performative dimensions of literary culture—as with voice mediating between style and character, and public interiorities at work between individual psyches and the social field.